Table of Contents

Introduction

Before going further into Kong Enterprise Edition (EE), make sure you understand
its purpose and philosophy. Once you are confident with the concept
of API Gateways, this guide is going to take you through a quick introduction on
how to use Kong and perform basic operations such as:

What is Kong, technically?

You’ve probably heard that Kong is built on NGINX, leveraging its stability and
efficiency. But how is this possible exactly?

To be more precise, Kong is a Lua application running in NGINX and made possible
by the lua-nginx-module.
Instead of compiling NGINX with this module, Kong is distributed along with
OpenResty, which already includes lua-nginx-module.
OpenResty is not a fork of NGINX, but a bundle of modules extending
its capabilities.

This sets the foundations for a pluggable architecture, where Lua scripts
(referred to as ”Kong plugins”) can be enabled and executed at runtime.
Because of this, we like to think of Kong as a paragon of microservice
architecture: at its core, it implements database abstraction, routing and
plugin management. Plugins can live in separate code bases and be injected
anywhere into the request lifecycle, all in a few lines of code.

Next Steps

Now, lets get familiar with learning how to “start” and “stop” Kong EE.